Tech & Biz

Sprint Dumps Customers:"It's Not You, It's Us" (AP)

by Jordan Yerman | July 11, 2007 at 01:43 pm

754 views | 5 Recommendations | 4 comments

Sprint Nextel, one of the USA's largest mobile phone service providers, has unilaterally terminated the contracts of roughly 1000 subscribers who had logged frequent calls to the customer service hotline. As described in the article below, some analysts see this as a move to prune Sprint's customer base to focus on big-spending, low-maintenance subscribers, whilst Sprint asserts that it was unable to satisfy the customers that it, well, ditched. I would suspect that, if a customer was truly unhappy, he or she would simply leave of their own accord. Still, Sprint's explanation does not really hang together, as access to a customer service line is part of the service that Sprint's customers pay for each month. Also, I have trouble accepting that someone would hang around on hold so many times just for kicks.

Sprint Nextel Corp. isn't apologizing for its decision to ax customers it determined were calling customer service too often.

The nation's third-largest wireless provider sent letters to about 1,000 subscribers June 29, saying the company's records showed they had made frequent calls for help with questions about billing and other account information.

"While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs," the letters said.

Here's the Dear John letter itself, which I found on Olga Kharif's posting on Businessweek.

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infomatique

at 14:27 on July 11th, 2007

Mobile Phone companies, in particular, have little interested in offering a service that is of real use to their customers. All the want to do is generate as much revenue as possible for as little effort as possible. Almost all customer facing activities are outsourced to the lowest bidder so in this context getting rid of unhappy customers makes a lot of sense especially if they sign up with the competition.

infomatique

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:28 on July 11th, 2007

jordan,

Good stuff.

gryphon

at 16:23 on July 12th, 2007

Yup. Great story and great business sense.

crossislanddrama

at 06:18 on August 8th, 2007

well considering the people who were "let go" had made over 40% of the customer service calls. 1000 people making 40% of customer service calls out of a company who has millions of customers. They deserved to get cut.